This February we hosted our first event of Papers We Love in Seoul. If you’re unfamiliar with the idea, here is a link to this amazing community.
I always wanted to do something UX related at Seoul Tech Society, but couldn’t settle on the format. When @seoul_engineer suggested to open Seoul Chapter for Papers We Love, I immediately thought on including UX papers along with theoretical CS.
For the first meetup, I have prepared a paper by John D Gould and Clayton Lewis: “Designing for usability: key principles and what designers think” (1985), which even after 30 years retains its significance and relevance.
In the paper authors present three principles for user centered design:
- Early focus on users
- Empirical measurement using prototypes
- Iterative design
When design a product, Gould and Lewis recommend start user testing from the very beginning of the design process, set and measure behavioral goals on real prospect users. Then they elaborate the principles and explain how they are applied in development, where they emphasize the importance of iteration, a process that enables cycles of designing > testing > measuring > redesigning.
To illustrate how to apply suggested principles to the development process I put in together a graphic scheme:
Discussion with the group reveled that questions authors bring up in the paper are still relevant for many teams and we’ve spend an interesting hour trying to find out why these intuitive principles are still not well adopted.
Explaining this paper was great experience and a challenge for me, would encourage everyone to give it a try.
Here are my presentation slides:
Event was supported by Seoul Tech Society and Seoul’s finest coworking space — Have Arena.
